24.4.12

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE

Sorry.
Where was I?

Oh yeah. I remember...

Eagle-eyed followers will have noticed I've not posted anything in the past month (the even more eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that I've not posted anything funny since the whole cat-thing a few months back...) and the reason is this:

I am sick of people.

Yes.
People.

Seventy year old song-strangler, Barbara Streisand, once said that "People who need people are the luckiest people of all" - at least I think that's what she said.

I don't know for sure.

"Memories... like the corners of my miiiind..."

I had my fingers in my ears.

And over my eyes.

But, anyway, she's talking rot.

It's very easy to subscribe to that view of people when you are fleecing them out of a couple of grand a pop to see you warble your way around some bloody awful showtunes, but Barbara Streisand doesn't have to get on a bus full of stabby little schoolkids and their bloody Rhianna ringtones, does she?

I don't need these people.

These people are idiots.

People with small suitcases on trolleys. People who fight outside pubs. People who argue about whether Britain's Got Talent or The Voice have the greater claim to validity. People who walk four-abreast on pavements and tut if you deem to walk towards them.

Apologists who cannot comprehend that annoying, twirling, chirruping, squeakbox and fashion template for Lord Voldermort, Michael Jackson, was anything but a social deviant living out a Scooby Doo villain's existence (ie, skulking around an abandoned fairground trying to trap kids, while all the time sporting an unrealistic rubber face...)

"You're how old??? Forget it then..."

People who ask "Ya get me?"when they they mean "Can you understand what I am saying?"- thus negating their previous inquiry.

People who claim the boat-race was ruined.

People who watched the chuffing boat-race.

People who claim to be bringing down the elitist nature of the boat-race but are happily walking around being called Trenton.

People who say "This is my jam" instead of "I am listening to this song".

The ELEVEN MILLION people who followed Nicki Minajon Twitter and unofficially made her"The Queen of Hip-Hop", despite her being incapable of rapping or singing, and who dances with all the grace and elegance of a string-bag of beachballs hung outside a seaside Post Office on a windy day.....

(...still, she has come on a long way since those Police Academy films, I suppose.)

People who cannot flush toilets on trains.

People who sat by and watched the NHS be destroyed.

People who defend celebrity rapists on Twitter.

People who accept that James Murdoch resigned a second job (that his father gave him) through no knowledge of illegal phone-hacking.

People who panic-bought petrol and pasties and jerry-cans and First-Class stamps.

Also people who still watch Eastenders, despite every single episode being exactly the same (usually about someone setting up a small business with their family, shouting about how important family is, having a fight in a pub with their family, getting 'mugged off' by their family, having a family full of rubbish gangsters, or - if it's Christmas - killing a member of their family).

Opportunist politicians of all parties, here and abroad, pointlessly point-scoring against one another rather than concentrating on a solution to a pressing global problem.

People who forget that the elected MP and co-Chairman of the Conservative Party, Peter Crudas, offered private access to the Prime Minister for a quarter of a million pounds, just because a dimwit called Samantha Brick blocked the internet by pretending to be pretty.

People who believe Ed Milliband can master an Opposition Party when he clearly cannot master a cup of tea.

People who bankrolled US Presidential candidate Rick Santorum - and will now never see that money again.

Or those listened to Newt Gingrich and thought "Yeah, I hate social welfare too - but I'd also like to see billions pumped into a sustainable moon-base city..."

People who think it is more important for a multi-millionaire to see how fast he can drive a car around Bahrain than the democratic rights of the people who live there.

Sportswear companies championing the human spirit in a series of adverts for running shoes that are made by someone in a sweatshop whose human spirit is being crushed, daily.

Every day I would try to think of something that wasn't as ludicrous as what the news would show me. Every day I failed.

So I stopped bothering. I can't invent things that are more ridiculous than what's actually happening.

I can't conjure up anything more fucking ridiculous than people sitting in boats, in period costumes, in a swimming pool, with dry ice and polystyrene 'icebergs', watching James Cameron's bloated boatfest "Titanic" - and think that that is an appropriate way of marking the centenary of a massive maritime disaster.

"Are you coming to the Concordia after-party?"

I just cannot do it.

The news and real life are making a mockery of trying to make a mockery of news and real life.

I can only imagine what the waste-bin of Armando Iannucci and the writers of The Thick Of It looks like."Ahhh great. George Galloway has been elected. That's a morning's work up the chuffer..."

The German philosopher Frederich Nietchze once said:"It's fine, honestly. Don't worry about it. Everyone spells it differently. I'm used to it. I once went to a book-signing and I thought they'd spelt my name wrong there. Turns out I'm at the wrong gig. It actually was for Mr Nice. Still, I got to meet Howard Marks and he's really cool..."

But I digress, he also said somehing more pertinent to my observations.

He said:"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

Or, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black....

People are idiots.

Not a person.
You for instance, reading this, you're alright.

You're better than alright, you're bloody great.

But once you get in a crowd, a mob, it's a whole different kettle of cod...

So, I've kept my distance.

I've carried on people-watching from afar, on FB and Twitter - and on one occasion on Google+!!

(Although that was like standing in the middle of a massive room where the next human being is a microdot at the opposite end...)

I've observed but not felt like interacting all that much.

I'm lucky. I like my own company. I can sit and read and wait until all this nonsense about elected mayors, Olympic countdowns, the Dutch government spitting it's dummy out, internet trolls threatening Alan Davies life for no good reason, the financial markets panicking like a cheerleader in a log cabin on Friday 13th... I'll just take a deep breath and ignore everything until people are ready to be sensible again and our leaders show some backbone and lead.

Well, that's what I thought. I'd happily written off the majority of the human race as faulty, gibbering idiots who need a kick up the pants and to stop acting like destructive babies.

Then something restored my faith in people.I saw the reaction to the death of Claire Squires.

Claire Squires, like thousands of other people, got up early on Sunday morning, while I slept off a hangover, and put on her running shoes to help raise money for the Samaritans for no other reason than "because they continually help others".

She never completed the London Marathon - she died later that morning.

Hundreds of strangers, thousands of people have been moved by the death of this one person and for once have acted in an exemplary manner and completely smashed her initial target of just £500.

At the last look the total raised was over five hundred thousand pounds.

And then I remembered Sport Relief, how thousands of people raised millions and millions of pounds for people they would never meet. How everyone, from children to pensioners delved into their own piddling cash reserves in the midst of a massive recession to make sure that someone else would not go without.